WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BE A DINOSAUR?

 Next month, Scientific American will feature dinosaurs.

Early in my youth, I made dinosaur figures using plaster of paris.   I then wanted to be a paleontologist.  I now know that this occupation forces you to spend ungodly time in horrible places with terrible weather.

But about that above Scientific American article:

• Begins with the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Note some fluffiness, as explained in the end of this posting.
• Brain weighed less than a pound.  
• We have a 3-pound brain, while an elephant has an 11-pound brain.  
• Dinosaurs and elephants were similar in size: T-Rex had a length of 40 feet and height of 20 feet, but elephants weighed more, 12,000 lb vs 9,000 pounds.
• A human brain is 2% of our body weight.   Elephant = 0.1% and dinosaur = 0.01%.

• 
  T-Rex had 3 billion neurons, while humans have 100 billion and a Nile crocodile around 0.8 million.  An emu has roughly 1.3 billion neurons.  Thus,  T-Rex was not capable of advanced planning or coordinated social hunting.  But it is suspected they could sniff the wind and identify living prey.
• Odor detection (number of olfactory receptor genes)
• Dinosaur  =  600, around same as cats, allowing for identification of living prey
• Humans  =  400
• Elephant  =  2,000 (can sense water 12 miles away)
• 
  Eyesight of dinos about same as birds.  
• As for example, an eagle can spot a rabbit from half a mile away.
• Dinos had color vision.
• Elephants see yellow and blue, but not red and green.
• Dogs and cats are mostly colorblind.

But the average dinosaur in itself does not say much because some were as tiny as a chicken and, well, many were large, more than 100 tons.  Watch this video.

• 
  Dinosaurs appeared around 250 million years ago.  Sizes?
• The heaviest is the Argentinosaurus at 75 tons (right).
• Longest is the Supersaurus at 130 feet.
• Tallest is the Sauroposeidon at 69 feet.

• 
  For the longest while, the T-Rex was thought to be the biggest land predator at close to 10 tons.  However, some scientist now think that the Spinosaurus might have been double that weight..

• 
  In 1842, English naturalist Sir Richard Owen coined the term Dinosauria, derving from the Greek Deinos, meaning fearfully great, and sauros, or lizard.
• The greatest dino-hunter was American Barnum Brown who explored from 1897 and found the first specimens of the T-Rex.
• This will disappoint many, but the Stegosaurus lived about 150 million years ago, while the T-Rex only became prominent a few million years before that extinction event 66 million years ago.  They never saw each other.
• 700 known species of dinosaur fossils have been found on all seven continents.
• Dinosaurs as we know them mostly disappeared 66 million years ago when something from outer space crashed on the coast of the Yucatan, called the Chicxulub Impact, triggering the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, eliminating 75% of plant and animal species.  
  
• 
  The energy released was more than a billion times that of the combined Hiroshima/Nagasaki Atomic Bombs.  Sunlight was blocked (50%) for more than a year, and maybe two.
• In the history of Planet Earth, this was the only extinction event caused by an asteroid.
• If you were a dinosaur heavier than 55 pounds, you did not survive.  This event began the current Cenozoic era.
• Luis Alvarez and son Walter proposed their concept of a massive asteroid 6-9 miles wide being responsible.  The signature was the element Iridium.

You can make up your own list, but paleontologist Steve Brusatte and author of the book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, has a ranking of the top 10 dinosaur films of all time:

• #1    Jurassic Park, 1993, Rotten Tomatoes 92.
• #2    Jurassic World, 2015, RT 71.
• #3    Walking with Dinosaurs.  2013, RT 24.
• #10  Jurassic Park III, 2001, RT 49.

Interestingly enough, Book Authority has the Top 10 Best Selling Dinosaur Books of All Time, and...

• #1    The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte.
• #2    Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs, Robert Sabuda.  12 pages of pop-up stuff, mostly for children.
• #3    Dinosaurs, Kathleen Zoehfeld.  For school children.
• You can click on the source to see the rest.   Yes, probably not your kind of list.

The Guardian has a longer list of 20:

• #1    Jurassic Park.
• #2    King Kong, 2005, RT 84.
• #3    One Million Years BC, 1966, RT 67.
• #20  Jurassic World:  Fallen Kingdom, 2018, RT 46.

To end, more and more, paleontologists are beginning to think that the largest dinosaurs had feathers.  This the Yutyrannus huali, weighing in aat 1.5 tons, a cousin of T-Rex, has has here a shaggy coat of proto-feathers.  Read how out present birds came from dinosaurs.

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